21 Sep   Greetings Class, With this last (required) discussion board to

 
Greetings Class,
With this last (required) discussion board topic, I would like for you as a class to discuss fossils and geologic time.  Maybe you can pick a specific fossil, like Trilobites, and discuss their geologic and evolutionary significance.  Or pick a specific region in the world where there is a known abundance of fossils from specific geologic time periods. Maybe find a journal article discussing a new type of fossil recently discovered. Give us information, pictures, an article to read or maybe a youtube link to watch (only appropriate videos please) about your fossils or the geologic area it was found. If you are having difficulty on deciding what to discuss, review Chapter 9 and 10 to get a good idea of what may interest you, such as a geologic time period or fossil that interests you, then comment on TWO of your fellow classmates posts.  Remember that you need to state more than a couple of sentences to receive full credit.  Here is an example to help you:
The Cambrian Explosion and the Burgess Shale:  https://youtu.be/NvjPb-lgqMY
The Burgess Shale can be found in Canada and is a really cool discovery because it preserved soft-bodied organisms dating to 508 Ma, information that is typically lost due to decompositions.  But, with the Burgess Shale, a massive underwater landslide quickly buried these organisms and bacteria was not able to break down the soft-bodied organisms possibly due to anoxic conditions resultant from compacted clay particles, leaving a treasure-trove of soft-bodied fossils to be found.  This area is often referred to the evolutionary equivalent of the Big Bang in terms of Earth’s biological evolution.  As the video discusses, this area was discovered by Charles Walcott on accident, he stopped to check on his horse and noticed something in the rock. He spent the next several decades going back to that location and removing over 65,000 fossils.